Testimony of Harrison Livingstone

MR. LIVINGSTONE: Thank you for inviting me. Also, I think it is terribly
important that these hearings are open, and it is a very good thing that you
have done this.

I a best selling author. I have written four books on the assassination of
President Kennedy, two of them were best sellers, the fourth one will be
published in the spring. I represent the Association of Assassination
Researchers, which is new and just forming.

I think everything that people have discussed here today is quite important in
various areas in terms of the records that they want to obtain, but I think
you need priorities, and those priorities should start with certain facts in
the evidence of the assassination.

In other words, where we are in our criminal investigation today, I do have
the help of law enforcement on their own time. We do a great deal of many
trips to Dallas, and very intense investigation. The focus of my personal
investigation is in the medical evidence and the forgery of the autopsy
photographs, the forgery of the X-rays. I am responsible for that, and we
have basically broken the case. You need to take some time to study just
where that is at because your priorities should include making every available
document and piece of physical evidence connected with those forgeries, and
the faking of the autopsy in President Kennedy's murder your primary
responsibility.

As for your problem with defining just what is documents in this case, does
that include the physical evidence, the Bullet 399, for instance, the rifle,
the windshield as has been mentioned here. This will lead in a moment to the
problems that I am having with the National Archives right now, an agency that
you need to be sure that they are making documents and materials available,
and they are not.

With 399, for very many years no one has been able to get access to it.
Josiah Thompson described his efforts in Six Seconds in Dallas trying to
obtain access with a set of very fine scales to weigh 399 and perform other
examinations.

I am trying to get to see this material with trained police, forensic experts,
police officers, to see this material, and I have been given a royal
runaround, and have even been framed by staffers at the National Archives for
saying and doing things that I could not have done because they don't want to
show this material.

The reason why this is important to you is that if you look at the photographs
of 399 published by the Warren Commission and have engineering drawings made
of them, which I have submitted to the National Archives, that bullet is
entirely incompatible with the alleged murder weapon, the rifle. The lands
and grooves are not of the same count.

With regards to the autopsy photographs and X-rays, you need to examine the
whole business of the agreement with the Kennedy family which has put this
material out of your reach and out of our reach and where people have to go
and get permission from Burke Marshall at Yale.

I understand the reasons at the time in 1963 for protecting the sensibilities
of the Kennedy family. I am very aware of that. I worked for Senator Tydings
who is very close to the Kennedy family. But at this point, 30 years later,
people certainly have gotten over their grief, and we have to make this
material available to it.

Your next priority is, you have to see what the forgery of that evidence
means, and what the evidence is there for, and then all records connected with
Bethesda Naval Hospital, with the development of the alleged autopsy
photographs, with the X-rays, all military personnel records of every single
person that might have had any connection with that autopsy or anything else,
we need that material. We need to know where General Charles Cabell was on
that day. We need to know everything there is that can be found out about
Admiral Burkley, about Admiral Galloway, and all the rest.

Very briefly, before I get to two other problems here, if you, yourself, take
the time to look at the interviews conducted by the House of Representatives
with the autopsy doctors, they insisted that the autopsy photographs to not
show the wounds on the body that they had, and the House of Representatives,
as I pointed out in my first book, commented on the fact of the persistent
disparity between the findings of the autopsy pathologist and what we see in
the autopsy pictures. The wounds have moved quite a bit.

No, the body wasn't stolen; no, it wasn't altered; but, yes, all of the
physical evidence in this case was faked, and this is the core of the mystery
of what happened to John Kennedy.

Now we hear here today and with these organizations a lot of finger-pointing
at everybody's favorite scapegoat, which is the CIA, and I am not here to
protect the CIA, but the point is that all the attention is being directed
away from the military, away from Bethesda Naval Hospital, away from the
Office of Naval Intelligence, away from Army Intelligence, Military
Intelligence, and this has been a common thing in this case for many years
with attention being drawn to the Mafia, to Castro, to Russia -- Krushchev did
it, everybody and his brother.

But the bottom line of it is that the medical evidence in this case is a fraud
and a lie. If your priority should be, if you have an investigative capacity,
to take a look at that and start dealing with it and make damned sure that
every possible interview, every possible document that might be remotely with
that coverup that began that night at Bethesda Naval Hospital that that
material be made available.

The agreement with the Kennedy family is clearly an illegal agreement with
regard to the autopsy pictures and X-rays and other materials because this is
evidence in a criminal case and it cannot be sequestered and taken out of the
public jurisdiction. It seems to me that you do have jurisdiction over that
matter.

There was a suit here in Federal court which was dismissed to try to overturn
that agreement. I hope that if you want, you will get in touch with me in the
future on that matter.

Another issue that I want to briefly talk about is, what is going on at the
National Archives, an agency. Presumably you are dealing with "agencies," so
far we hear about the CIA and the FBI and so on, but the National Archives is
an agency and there is a kind of surveillance going on now that these
documents are being made available that is unconscionable. It is way over the
line between reasonable need to protect these materials and deliberate
harassment of researchers.

[Applause.]

MR. LIVINGSTONE: Thank you. Anna Marie stormed out of here a little while
ago, she was driven to the point of hysteria in the National Archives, and
staffers are attaching themselves to researchers and will not go away. The
engage you in long conversations, and I clocked one of these conversations for
five hours, and researchers flew from California and a staffer devoted himself
to distracting that researcher from why he had spent all the money to come
here. So he didn't get what he was after. He was engaged in a social
discussion, a political discussion, and so on. The staffers are finding out
what people are researching. It seems to be floating around and being
reported to other people.

Before going any further, I want to say that this does not mean Steve Tilley
because he has been nothing but nice to me and everybody that I know, but we
also know of other cases there where the exact opposite is happening, and I
have personal knowledge of people actually being framed for things in order to
get rid of them. Anna Marie was threatened with the loss of her research
privileges, and so on.

So it is a conflict between reasonable surveillance for the protection of the
documents in the National Archives and where does it cross the line into
harassment.

Now you need to define, is this physical material, the bullet, the rifle, the
windshield, and all that, is this -- I don't know -- I don't think it is
specifically defined in the Act, so in my view you need to define that as part
of "documents," or whatever.

My final quick point is just, the National Archives should be encouraged to
make slides of each and every frame of all the other films that might be
available, such as the Nix film, the Hughes film, the Bronson film especially,
and to do blow-ups of this, and the Secret Service copies of the Zapruder film
which is badly damaged, you should inquire as to why it is so badly damaged
with the Secret Service. It is broken and ruined in a lot of places. How
could this have happened? How could they take such critical evidence in this
tragedy and it be ruined? But this visual evidence in this case is the key to
the murder of John Kennedy because it is all fake, and I mean the Zapruder
film is a fake.

The autopsy photographs are a fake. The autopsy X-rays are a fake. We first
determined this in 1979. In September Dr. David Mantik proved it with a test
in physics. My best friend is a chief radiologist, we have been examining
this for many years. We went to college together, and he is going to take
that study to the next step. The photographs have been wildly denounced by
the autopsy doctors themselves, but those documents are clearly edited. The
documents that were released here last fall are clearly edited.

At some other time, I will be glad to discuss that with you. I won't take any
more of your time.